Spectroscopy and imaging has held promise for adding quantitative and objective analysis of tissue samples. However, the application of spectroscopic measurements to tissue analysis is limited by the inability to correlate the spectroscopic data with histopathology which is evident in image data. This results from the interference of traditional contrasting agents with spectroscopic measurements. The present disclosure describes an approach to overcome this limitation.
Further, current spectroscopy and chemical imaging systems do not provide a link between a brightfield or regular optical image of a field of view (FOV) and its corresponding Raman (or any other type of) chemical image. Although a user can view both of these images simultaneously, the display is disjunctive in nature. The user cannot point to a region of interest (ROI) in the optical image and view the spectral information only for that region of interest. This selective viewing feature is not available in current chemical imaging systems.